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Saturday, April 29, 2017

`To Him Who Walks Alone Through Life'

Coleridge
was cursed with a homing instinct and a lifelong inability or refusal to find a
home. Such a contradiction is not rare. A roof over his head, a table and a bed
– he had them, but never contentedly or for long. Some find a home and hate it.
Some are happily homeless, and by choice. They remain rootless and travel
light. Not Coleridge. The reasons – emotional, behavioral, pharmaceutical – are
many. By the age of thirty-two he was permanently addicted to opium. His friend
Hazlitt, in “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” describes their meeting in 1798,
at Coleridge's temporary cottage in Somerset:

“Thus
I passed three weeks at Nether Stowey and in the neighborhood, generally
devoting the afternoons to a delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the
poet’s friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm trees, and listening to the
bees humming round us, while we quaffed our flip.”

Flip,
for the uninitiated, is “a mixture of beer and spirit sweetened with sugar and
heated with a hot iron.” No wonder the scene is recollected in tranquility.
Hazlitt is also temperamentally homeless, but not as cripplingly so as
Coleridge. Though he would later turn on Coleridge, his expression of gratitude
for his friend’s kindness is heartfelt:

“I
had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to
others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone
into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was
at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side,
crushed, bleeding lifeless . . . that my understanding also did not remain dumb
and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to
Coleridge.”

He
next moved, with wife, to Greta Hall, Keswick, in the Lake District. In an 1802 letter to Thomas Manning, Charles Lamb describes a visit: “Coleridge had got a
blazing fire in his study; which is a large, antique, ill-shaped room, with an
old-fashioned organ, never played upon, big enough for a church, shelves of
scattered folios, an Æolian harp, and an old sofa, half-bed, &c.” It sounds
cozy but from at least 1804, Coleridge’s life was ruled around the clock by
laudanum. He consumed up to two quarts a week of the tincture of opium. From
1816 he found a surrogate home with Dr. James Gillman and his wife in Highgate,
on Hampstead Heath. He completed the long-delayed Biographia Literaria there, and remained with the Gillmans for the
last eighteen years of his life.

Coleridge
was in flight from a marriage he had ruined. He would never again have anything
like a normal family life with Sara and their three children, who remained in
the care of his priggish brother-in-law, Robert Southey. Coleridge was also fleeing his
unrequited passion for Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law. He had a
lifelong knack for creating gratuitous complications. At the Gillmans' home in
1826, less than six years before his death, Coleridge wrote perhaps the most self-pitying Christmas poem in history, “Homeless”: